Washington — A group of survivors of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse is suing the Trump administration and Google over the release of their personal information in troves of files made public by the Justice Department.
The survivors filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court in California on Thursday arguing that the Justice Department’s disclosure of their personally identifiable information was a violation of federal privacy law. They are seeking at least $1,000 per class member from the government and an unspecific amount of damages from Google.
In their lawsuit, the survivors said that while the Justice Department took down their information after it was published in late 2025 and earlier this year, online entities like Google continued to republish it and have refused requests to remove it.
“Survivors now face renewed trauma,” they said in their suit. “Strangers call them, email them, threaten their physical safety, and accuse them of conspiring with Epstein when they are, in reality, Epstein’s victims.”
The Justice Department published more than 3 million pages of records related to its investigation into Epstein after Congress passed and President Trump signed into law the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which required the department to disclose all of its unclassified material.
Documents were made public in several tranches in late December and through the end of January, and included videos, court records, FBI and Justice Department documents, emails, text messages and news clippings. Some of the material included mentions of prominent figures like President Trump, former President Bill Clinton, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Prince Andrew, and billionaires Elon Musk and Bill Gates.
But the files also initially contained nearly 100 survivors’ personal information, including their names, phone numbers and images. After learning of the disclosures, the Justice Department took down the documents containing that information, including one with unredacted photos of 21 survivors and most of their birthdates.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Justice Department reviewed 6 million pages in all and released roughly half of those pages. A portion of the records were withheld for various reasons, he said, including because they contain survivors’ personal information.
The survivors said in their lawsuit that while the Justice Department removed the files from its website, the department has known that the unredacted documents are still publicly available on other websites, including those maintained by Google. The government has “done nothing to demand their removal,” they said.
Public statements from Blanche, “viewed together with DOJ’s subsequent document-dump, demonstrate that the United States intentionally prioritized volume and speed of public disclosure over the safety and privacy of Epstein survivors, adopting a release now, retract later approach that made unlawful disclosures of victim (personally identifying information) not merely foreseeable, but inevitable,” the survivors said.
Epstein was investigated by state authorities in Florida in 2005. He agreed to plead guilty to two state prostitution charges and serve an 18-month prison sentence as part of a deal with federal prosecutors that saw him avoid federal prosecution.
Epstein was then indicted on federal sex trafficking charges in 2019. He died by suicide at a Manhattan correctional facility while awaiting trial.
